today the world has seen for the very first time an image of a black hole captured by Event Horizon telescope

for my own personal story,

when i was a young boy, my neighbor Billy across the street had this new technology the VCR. you pop in VHS tapes into it and it plays movies.

My family did not originally own one, this was early 80s.

one movie i remember watching at his house was

The Black Hole (1979)

he apparently went to a VHS rental store, something that will be extinct like the dinosaurs and rented this movie. the movie came out in 1979, so i must have seen it around 1980 since he was saying this was a new movie that was just released, to VHS/VCR

now I didn't understand what this movie was about or what a black hole was.

in elementary school i was told Albert Einstein was the smartest person to have ever lived.

in junior high i took a junior high physics class that used basic algebra. but teacher talked about Eisenstein and the theory of relativity

The "smart" kids were talking about Einstein and what happens when you go near light speed. this overlaped with my own interest in science fiction cartoons like robotech and transformers and voltron.

in some ways its like the paranormal, the twilight zone. we live in what we think is normal reality.

but if we could travel near the speed of light things would be very different like the twin paradox.

time would flow slower to a twin travelling close to the speed of light whereas the other light speed traveling twin will age normally. when the other twin returns to earth he wouldn't have aged as much as the twin on earth.

that's almost paranormal, excpet it is accepted physics as told by Einstein.

It was there in junior high the physics teacher Mr. Griffin also talked about black holes which has gravity so strong not even light can escape and Einstein also predicted it.

not sure if that's entirely correct but ok.

i knew some really smart kids and they talked about a new theory called string theory in the 1980s, which they said it would unite einstein theory of general relativity with quantum mechanics

in the 1990s i saw a best seller Brian Green's Elegant Universe and Michio Kaku Hyperspace and Stephen Hawking a brief moment in time.

sadly i'm not smart enough to be a theoretical physicists but it makes for interesting reading. i also so nova documentaries on string theory

I saw Interstellar 2014

obviously the special effects technology from Black Hole 1979 to Interstellar 2014

because i studied string theory via popular books, I knew of the idea that space and time in some theories are interchangeable so they showed time being represented as space.

and today, Wed Apr 10, 2019 12:09 pm

humanity saw for the first time

so my own journey was watching that 1979 black hole movie, to elementary school hearing some guy named Albert Einstein, to junior high physics talking about relativity. the smart kids i knew talked about Einstein and quantum mechanics and string theory.

special effects and computers improved to the point they can offer a computer simulation of a black hole event horizon.

today, i and humanity saw a black hole from a real telescope

obviously when i learned about this i ask all kinds of questions like,

do they last forever? what's inside a black hole? if nothing escapes a black hole, how does gravity escape a black hole?

i now know that a major research interest is understanding black holes quantum mechanically, which requires a quantum theory of gravity which is what string theory provides. some of these books also mention a rival, loop quantum gravity.

for me, i kinda wish i could create a psychic black hole, where like Interstellar, i can visual time as a space, and therefore visit past and future.

visiting the future of course would result in paradoxes like if i could see my future and see i will be killed in a car accident, i can now change by not entering the car?

so my story of black holes from a kid to now.

as a young boy watching black hole 1979 on VHS but when it was just released to VHS like arond 1980, i had no idea what was happening and why, or what a black hole even was. now i know, at least at the level of someone who has read books on string theory.

in some ways learning about this is kinda of an escapist fantasy for me. one minute i'm watching Michio Kaku and Briane Greene explain string theory and I imagine time traveling.

tomorrow i wake up and i'm going to the dentist to have yet another tooth removed painfully. dentistry of the removing damaged teeth kind and alzheimer's dementia is more relevant to my reality. but yeah i wish i could see into the future.